by Bryce Edwards

Green Party

28 October 2011

Holly Walker is the future of the Green Party. She’s high on the Greens’ party list and is likely to be elected to Parliament, where no doubt she will quickly make an impression, and eventually succeed Metiria Turei as co-leader, and probably become a Minister in government at some stage. Already she’s got quite a political pedigree: graduate of the Politics Department at the University of Otago, Editor of Critic magazine, Rhodes scholar to Oxford University, Policy Analyst at the Office of Treaty Settlements, and currently a spin-doctor in Parliament for the Greens. Walker is clearly on the way up, and she appears to represent a new generation of Green politicians that is re-positioning the party for more mainstream success. Gone are the days of marginal, sandal-wearing, political ‘outsiders’, Walker and her new cohort appear to be bringing about a new-found seriousness, professionalism, and perhaps even ‘Establishment’ allure to what is now the only real solid ‘third party’ in New Zealand politics. I’m interviewing Holly Walker today at 1pm as part of University of Otago Vote Chat – which you can watch live-streamed at www.bit.ly/ruN37y But what would you like me to ask her? [Read more below]

25 October 2011

To be successful, green parties must preserve a fundamentally dichotomous reputation. The development of the New Zealand Green Party exemplifies this. The ability to be seen as both insiders and outsiders, may seem inherently contradictory, however, as the New Zealand Green Party shows, it is entirely possible. This provides an interesting lens through which to examine the history of the Greens and the factors that have contributed to their success. This post is the fifth of five posts, written by Niki Lomax, based on her recent University of Otago Politics Department Honours dissertation which discusses the path the Greens’ have taken to get to this point, focusing on what has made the Green Party successful and what barriers has it faced in its quest for success. [Read more below]

20 October 2011

Since 2005 it has become increasingly clear that the Green Party’s electoral ambition has moved well beyond the five percent threshold. Rather than simply winning seats in parliament, the Greens want greater access to power and more opportunities to directly influence policy. From early 2006 the Green Party deliberately repositioned themselves in the hope of attracting a broader, more mainstream constituency. As Green co-leader Russel Norman stated: ‘The challenge for the Greens, I think, is to actually move out, move more into the suburbs and to appeal more to suburban New Zealanders.’ This blog post focuses on the ways in which the Green Party have tried to court this suburban vote. This post is the fourth of five posts, written by Niki Lomax, based on her recent University of Otago Politics Department Honour dissertation which discusses the path the Greens’ have taken to get to this point, focusing on what has made the Green Party successful and what barriers has it faced in its quest for success. [Read more below]

19 October 2011

Although New Zealand was home to the first national green party in the world, it was almost a quarter of a century before a green politician sat in the House of Representatives. This blog post details the development of the New Zealand Green Party from its origins through to the 2005 election, and discusses the transition of the Green Party from a fringe movement to a political party with a sustained parliamentary presence. This phase of the Green Party’s history is largely defined by its ‘outsider’ status and its ability to capitalise on voter disillusionment. Following electoral reform and the party’s entry into Parliament, this outsider status became problematic and the Greens had to revaluate their positioning and strategy, looking instead to project more of an ‘insider’ status. This blog post is the third of five, written by Niki Lomax, based on her recent University of Otago Politics Department Honour dissertation which discusses the path the Greens’ have taken to get to this point, focusing on what has made the Green Party successful and what barriers has it faced in its quest for success. [Read more below]

18 October 2011

In pursuing electoral success, green parties throughout the world have had to balance the tasks of projecting a status of being both insiders and outsiders at the same time. Put another way, greens need to sell themselves as both 'protesting radicals with principles' and as a pragmatic suit-wearing part of the political Establishment. This contradictory task is at the heart of the subject of how the New Zealand Green Party is searching for greater success. The necessity of an insider/outsider status is a peculiarity of green parties and does not apply to other minor parties to the same extent. This is because green parties emerged from distinctly anti-conventional, anti-establishment ‘outsider’ counter-cultural movements. Political parties were seen as part of the establishment that these movements rejected, yet, from these movements political parties emerged. This fascinated political scientists in the 1980s and early 1990s, and consequently a considerable amount has been written about the emergence and success of green parties in this period. This blog post is the second of five, written by Niki Lomax, based on her recent University of Otago Politics Department Honour dissertation which discusses the path the Greens’ have taken to get to this point, focusing on what has made the Green Party successful and what barriers has it faced in its quest for success. [Read more below]

17 October 2011

The New Zealand Green Party has the potential to achieve unprecedented electoral success at the 2011 General Election. Over the last few years, the party has undergone a transformation that has seen them become increasingly pragmatic and mainstream. This reflects the Greens’ ambition to target a broader, more ‘suburban’ constituency. This blog post is the first of five, written by Niki Lomax, based on her recent University of Otago Politics Department Honour dissertation which discusses the path the Greens’ have taken to get to this point, focusing on what has made the Green Party successful and what barriers has it faced in its quest for success. An assessment of theoretical explanations for the success of green parties internationally, and in particular the examination of their unconventional political origins, ultimately shows that the key to explaining green success lies in their inherently contradictory reputation for being both insiders and outsiders simultaneously. The history of the Greens’ electoral success can clearly be tied to their ability, or indeed inability, to maintain an insider/outsider status. Leading up to the 2011 election, the Greens have demonstrated a skilful ability to balance this dichotomous reputation. This could see the party achieve a higher electoral result than ever before. However, this research suggests that in the long-term, the ability of the New Zealand Green Party to use their insider/outsider status to achieve electoral success is limited. [Read more below]

03 June 2011

At this weekend’s Green Party annual meeting, the Greens will be considering the prospect of whether they would be willing to enter into a National-led government after the 2011 election. The most evocative but accurate way that the new political positioning of the party has been explained can be found on the official Green Party blogsite, Frogblog, where one Green explains it like this: ‘It's all about leverage for me. The past strategies of the Greenz have resulted in many years in parliament, none in government. By showing off your left wing underpants in the seductive dance of election time you get this... National.. I can ignore that maiden, she'll never sleep with me labour.. I can ignore that maiden, she's 'in the sack' Result? MORE years NOT in government. I'm assuming here that the Green party was formed to get into Government? Or was it just to get into parliament?’ I doubt that the Green MPs would be likely to use this particular analogy to sell the remit that they are putting to their members and eventually to voters. By making their own party sound like seductors or seductresses desperate for sex, the Greens could be seen to be prostituting themselves for power – but perhaps that is quite apt? [Read more below]

01 December 2010

The year 2009 was a hectic one in New Zealand politics, partly because it was the first year of the new National Party Government’s term in office. At a general election in November of the previous year, National had ousted the Labour Party from its three-term tenure in office and formed a single-party minority government with support agreements with the Act Party, the Maori Party and United Future – all of whom gained ministerial roles outside the cabinet. In this first year, the new administration was both ideologically centrist and highly popular, being challenged only on difficult issues relating to the economic recession, political finance controversies over MPs’ expenses and various race relations questions. The following blog post examines these issues via a ‘Review of New Zealand politics in 2009’ which has just been published as a peer-reviewed journal article in the top political science periodical, the European Journal of Political Research (in the December 2010 edition). As well as looking at how the National Government fared in 2009, it also briefly analyses the main issues in politics (such as the economy, social issues, political finance scandals) and the changes in the other parliamentary political parties. [Read more below]

24 November 2010

The co-leader of the Green Party, Russel Norman, apparently has trouble telling the difference between red and blue – he’s colour-blind according to a revealing and in-depth article about the changing political direction of the Green Party. The article in the Dominion Post by Nikki Macdonald opens by saying that ‘Green politics is the new, well, red and blue’, and goes through the dilemmas that the party is facing as it pushes towards the centre of the political spectrum with the new leadership keen to pick up all different hues of political support. The supposedly red-green ideological combination is out of favour with the leadership, and the party is determined to diversify by adding blues and other hues to the green brand. According to the article, this is alienating those that remain in the party’s leftwing activist base, while senior business-oriented stalwarts are celebrating the move away ‘the socialist side’ of the political divide. Yet despite the internal disagreement over which bright ideological political colours the party should be orientating towards, the article seems to suggest that in reality the whole parliamentary caucus of the party is essentially now colour-blind and they actually seem to prefer the colour beige most of all. [Read more below]

27 October 2010

Matt McCarten’s candidacy in the Mana by-election is one of the most promising developments on the New Zealand left for many years. Not only does this mean that the by-election just became much more interesting, McCarten’s campaign has much wider political ramifications – for example, it could be the launching pad for a new party to fill the gaping big hole on the left of the political spectrum in New Zealand. This blog post looks at why McCarten is standing in the election, whether he could actually win the seat, who might support him, and what it all means for Labour and the Greens. [Read more below]

26 October 2010

The industrial dispute over the filming of the The Hobbit in New Zealand is a long way from reaching the status of seminal political events in New Zealand history such as the 1951 waterfront lockout or the 1981 anti-Springbok tour. But it’s certainly got some similarities. As with those highly important events that divided the country, the Labour Party has been highly pragmatic in its attempts to keep its distance lest any actions or statements of principle have any possibility of damaging its electoral popularity. So just as in 1951, when Labour Party leader Walter Nash declared that ‘We are not for the waterside workers, and we are not against them’, again in 2010 Labour is essentially saying the same thing, desperately avoiding having to take the side of the workers against the torrent of the campaign against them. [Read more below]

30 September 2010

Within all political parties there is a tension between principle and pragmatism. A balance needs to be found between keeping to a party’s ideological beliefs and the more opportunistic pragmatism sometimes required to gain and keep power. Modern New Zealand political parties lean strongly towards the pragmatic side of the equation, and the Green Party is no exception. As the party has aged and changed its leadership it has become particularly keen to leave behind its principle-oriented way of doing politics, shift towards the centre of the political spectrum, and be seen as moderate and respectable rather than radical or purist. This development can be seen very clearly in the party leadership’s latest triumph of pragmatism over principle – the decision to support the draconian the Canterbury Earthquake Response & Recovery Act (CERRA) in Parliament. By voting for this landmark legislation, the Green MPs have incurred the wrath of the party’s more principled members and supporters. Usually the Green leadership is able to easily assert its pragmatism over the activist idealism, but that has definitely not happened this time. Instead, the grassroots Greens are in revolt, the leadership is being heavily censured, and there is even talk of the need for Russel Norman to step down as co-leader due to the political mismanagement and opportunism apparent in this latest debacle. [Read more below]

01 June 2010

Green Party members and supporters have gone to extraordinary lengths to fight an internal battle against the leadership over the selection of the party list for next years general election. Advertisements have appeared in daily newspapers across the country today that seek to pressure a change in the constitution to ensure that the leadership follows its own claims to have a democratic list selection involving the votes of members. This raises some interesting questions about the state of internal Green Party politics and that of democracy in the organization. [Read more below]

20 May 2010

The regressive GST increase being implemented by the National Government would not be reversed by a Green Party government. That’s the message found in the Greens’ new alternative budget released this week. Despite its posturing over issues of inequality the party’s pro-GST stance shows that the Greens are no enemy of inequality. The Green Party used to campaign on getting rid of GST. Now it accepts the increased 15% rate of GST, and doesn’t even advocate the mildly-leftwing demand of exempting food from the tax. [Read more below]

26 April 2010

The New Zealand post-election books that are published by Victoria University of Wellington always contain chapters written by political party members – usually MPs – and are often a bit hit and miss. When they’re good, the writer will give invaluable insights into how their party ran their campaign, what they were trying to achieve, what went well and what didn’t, etc. Unfortunately, often the party participant isn’t really up to the challenge, and this is certainly the case with Catherine Delahunty’s chapter on the Greens’ campaign. It’s hard to get much out of her chapter in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. [Read more below]

13 April 2010

Under MMP we supposedly have a multi-party system – with a plethora of minor parties giving colour and life to political debate. But the reality is that this image is more of a mirage. Our minor parties are the weakest they’ve been for decades, and it’s not clear that any of the them have an assured future in Parliament. These are the issues examined by Jennifer Curtin and Raymond Miller in their excellent chapter entitled ‘New Zealand’s party system: a multi-party mirage?’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). This blog post highlights some of the most interesting points made by Curtin and Miller, including the suggestion of a more limited future for the smaller parties. [Read more below]

06 April 2010

Why was Labour turfed out of office in 2008? Colin James puts down the Government’s electoral decline to Labour’s ‘failure of political management’ in areas such as the Electoral Finance Act and the so-called anti-smacking bill, as well as generally being punished for pushing a heavy socially liberal agenda. Labour also lost the electoral fight to show that it was the toughest on law and order. James says that the victorious National Party got there due to John Key’s ‘bland leading the bland’ strategy, which now results in a managerial ‘government by MBA’. James writes about these issue and others in a chapter entitled ‘2008: The last baby-boomer election’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). This blog post highlights some of the salient points made in this chapter. [Read more below]

19 March 2010

Commercialism Vs Professionalism. That’s the tension present in modern media coverage of politics according to Babak Bahador, who’s written a very good chapter entitled ‘Media coverage of the election’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). Bahador asks, ‘So how did the New Zealand media balance these forces during the 2008 election? Did they follow commercial trends in other Western democracies towards increasingly partisan, negative, presidential and superficial coverage? Or did they maintain a reasonable degree of professionalism in their coverage and fulfil their democratic duty?’. He attempts to answer these questions with a comprehensive content analysis of the New Zealand Herald, Dominion Post, the Press, and TV1 and TV3 evening news. He comes up with some very interesting results. [Read more below]

17 February 2010

The National and Green parties won the battle of YouTube in the New Zealand general election of 2008 according to a chapter entitled ‘2008: The YouTube campaign’ by Rob Salmond in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. The chapter looks ‘at the different ways in which political parties used YouTube to communicate with New Zealanders’, and argues that successful strategies involved putting positive-themed political advertisements on television and using YouTube for the negative, attack-advertising. Unsurprisingly, twice as many YouTube clips were negative, and on average these were watched by 2.5 times more than positive videos. [Read more below]

15 February 2010

New Zealand’s preeminent psephologists – that is, political scientists that study and explain elections - Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts have just published their latest book, entitled Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008. This edited collection is their ‘eighth in a series of New Zealand post-election books that have followed on from conferences held shortly after each general election’. The book attempts, they say, to provide ‘an overall perspective of what occurred and why’. As well as editing the book, Levine and Roberts wrote two chapters and a preface, which are discussed in this blog post. This work explains some of the factors shaping voting behaviour, making use of a pre-election voter survey that they commissioned – which they’ve done in every election since 1984. The results show, for instance that the Greens were the least liked party in the 2008 election, and that Helen Clark was no match for John Key in what was a two-horse leadership race [Read more below]

07 December 2009

Today the Green Party is celebrating a landmark that is well worth reflecting upon: ten years in Parliament. In our fluctuating MMP environment, that's quite an achievement. In this regard, various media are reporting some of my brief comments on the party’s achievements, current standing, and future. See the news articles on the TVNZ and NewstalkZB websites. I’m reported as saying that ‘the Green Party is sporting a “bland” new image and its biggest achievement is that it has survived’. This blog post expands on some of these comments, and draws attention to a new academic textbook chapter written about the Greens. [Read more below]

27 November 2009

To what extent does the
left-right political dimension still structure political party competition in
New Zealand politics? Where do the parties sit on that spectrum? What other
political dimensions now underpin our electoral politics? This extensive blog
post presents the findings of a regular survey of New Zealand political
scientists about party ideological conflict that has been carried out for the
three MMP general elections of 1996, 2002, and 2008. Explaining the results,
and drawing on some previous blog posts, it argues that the left-right spectrum
is of declining importance in New Zealand politics, and that ideological
conflict is cohered to a greater degree by post-materialist issues. The major
political parties in New Zealand now all agree on the basic post-Keynesian
economic framework that dominates discourse and policy formation. No party
fundamentally challenges the paradigm shift that occurred with the neoliberal
revolution that occurred from 1984 onwards. All parties now agree, explicitly
or implicitly, that the market is the best mechanism for generating wealth and
distributing good and services. Within this ‘new policy consensus’ there is, of
course, room for some limited discussion of when and where the state should
intervene to correct market failure, but because there is essentially no debate
of any substance around material/economic issues, what might be called
‘postmaterial issues’ now represent the arena for ideological and political
conflict in parliamentary politics. Furthermore, within this post-reform
era political conflict is underpinned by a strong pragmatism rather than
principle. Some explanations are proposed for the rise of the new consensus,
the decline of left-right conflict, and the increasing salience of societal
issues in electoral competition. [Read more below]

13 November 2009

The Green Party candidate in the recent Mt Albert by-election ran the most expensive campaign, spending an incredible $39,071, or about $15 per vote. Figures just released by the Electoral Commission show that Russel Norman outspent all other candidates in order to come a distant third in the race, with only 2,567 votes. Once again, this shows the Greens to be one of the rich parties, and that it continues to believe its own mistaken mantra that ‘money buys elections’. [Read more below]

19 October 2009

Sue Bradford says that she is departing the Green Party in Parliament after her more leftwing political vision for the party was dismissed by the wider party when it chose Metiria Turei over her for the leadership. Following on from John Moore’s controversial post about on this entitled A bad marriage leads to divorce – the splintering of the Greens, I listened to a recent interview of Sue Bradford about her resignation and about the state of the Greens, and found that much of what Bradford said in this Radio New Zealand National Focus on Politics interview by Julian Robbins, actually backs up John Moore’s argument. Bradford is explicit that she is leaving Parliament because of the Greens rejecting her, and she states clearly that the party has lost its radical nature, is chasing middle voters, and that some in the Green Party will be happy about her departure because it allows the party to shift further to the right. [Read more below]

16 October 2009

Sue Bradford's resignation from Parliament has been met by dismay or sadness from much of the New Zealand left. Although the Green Party has been shifting rightwards for a number of years, the extent of this shift has become much more apparent now, and it will continue to do so because Bradford’s departure will be followed by further resignations from what remains of a leftwing in the Greens. Guest blogger John Moore argues that one positive outcome of Bradford’s resignation would be a complete leftwing break with the Greens – this would allow the Greens’ intrinsic political nature as a centre-right force to be exposed. In the meantime, Moore argues, any left-progressives that choose to stay in the party will inevitably only damage themselves by acting as a cover for what is in reality a pro-capitalist party of the Establishment. [Read more below]

11 September 2009

In 2008 the Green Party was set to become the third largest party in Parliament. To get there the party attempted to take a qualitatively different approach to the past – adopting a highly professsionalised and market-oriented strategy. Taking the ‘Americanisation’ of politics towards its logical conclusion the Green also embraced a very celebrity-focused method of campaigning, while still relying on some traditional minor party media stunts. The party also attempted to break out of its ‘left ghetto’ but with mixed success. These are some of the issues that I focus on in the section on the Green Party within my chapter entitled ‘Party Strategy and the 2008 Election’ which is part of the recently published book Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008 (edited by Chris Rudd, Janine Hayward and Geoff Craig). This blog post is the ninth of a series of explorations of the chapters from the new book, and it constitutes the original draft section about the Greens that I wrote for my chapter. Subsequently this draft was substantially reworked, edited, and condensed for the final book, so please see the published book for the final and ‘authoritative’ version. [Read more below]

16 August 2009

Which political parties had the best advertising in the last year’s general election? How come the Greens’ had such good advertising but did relatively poorly? What was wrong with Labour’s advertising? What was right about National’s advertising strategy? Did New Zealand First lose representation because of, or despite of, its election advertising and strategy? Did the Electoral Finance Act properly define and understand what a political advertisement is? Claire Robinson answers these questions in her chapter entitled ‘”Vote for me”’: Political Advertising’, published in Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008 (edited by Chris Rudd, Janine Hayward and Geoff Craig of the University of Otago Politics department). This blog post is the fifth of a series of explorations of the chapters from the new book (which I also have a chapter in). [Read more below]

17 June 2009

The Green Party has long posed as the ‘party of political honesty’ and of political finance transparency. Green politicians love to repeat the metaphor that ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’ for political finance corruption. Yet although they have often demanded somewhat draconian transparency when it comes to the private finances of other parties, when it comes to their own sources of public finance – particularly their reliance on backdoor parliamentary state funding – the Greens prefer opaqueness and obfuscation. It should not be surprising therefore that the Green Party response to increasing public concern about the use by politicians of taxpayer resources and expenses has been worse than useless. Rather than helping ‘open the books’ as the party promised, the Greens have disingenuously attempted to limit public knowledge of MP expenses and parliamentary budgets. Not only has the party only provided very limited information about its use of parliamentary funding, but the model that the Greens have put forward for disclosure actually attempts to quell the growing public concern about political corruption while also confusing the issue and robbing the public of their right to know how politicians spend public money on themselves. The following critique of the Green Party’s recent political finance disclosure argues that there should be maximum transparency for the use of parliamentary funding and that the reason the Greens are doing their best to limit the books being opened is because that party has the most to lose from parliamentary transparency. [Read more below]

29 May 2009

The Green Party contest for its next female co-leader is essentially an ideological decision between two candidates from the left and right factions of the party. Sue Bradford is undoubtedly the left option in the contest – which is partly why she won't be elected. As pointing out in the blog post on Meteria Turei, Sue Bradford is incredibly unlikely to win the contest for the Green Party female co-leader – mostly due to the fact that she is - for better or worse - very strongly associated with the so-called anti-smacking bill, an elitist style of process for pushing forward this social change, and has been typecast as a radical ‘extremist’. In fact, the decision of who to select to replace Jeanette Fitzsimons will effectively decide the ideological trajectory of the party over the foreseeable future. Bradford is the choice of those that are uncomfortable with the party's very deliberate shift towards the centre of the political spectrum under Fitzsimons and Russel Norman. This blog post takes a look at Sue Bradford's past, suggests that the left option in the Greens will lose and the party will hasten its shift not only towards greater independence from the Labour Party, but also towards the right. It also tries to unpack the history and politics of Bradford, attempting to get beyond some of the simplicities and myths projected about this unique but also rather ordinary politician [Read more below]

27 May 2009

The formation of the Alliance in 1991 was a watershed in the NewLabour Party’s (NLP) development, especially in that all four of the party’s Alliance partners were considerably to the right of the NLP on most economic issues, and largely unsympathetic to the NLP’s strong ideological emphasis on working class interests. Thus the NLP’s semi-merger with the Greens, Democrats, Liberals and Mana Motuhake contributed to the NLP leadership’s rightward movement. Politically, this project led to a watering-down of the policy and principles that the NLP has worked for. Organisationally it led to the NLP, especially its branches, being subsumed into the larger Alliance structure. [Read more below]

27 April 2009

Every year the European Journal of Political Research publishes a political date yearbook which gives a review of politics in a number of western countries. I contribute the section on New Zealand to the journal – last year’s publication on New Zealand politics in 2007 can be read here. Below is the first draft of my review of New Zealand politics in 2008. It still requires a bit of abridging and editing, and as always I’m interested in feedback and suggestions, which you can leave in the comments section or email me (edwards.bryceATgmail.com). [Read more below]

05 March 2009

The Green Party spent a record $1,706,633 fighting the 2008 election, which amounts to $10.83 per vote! Put another way, it cost the Greens $189,626 for each of their nine seats in Parliament. The official party election expenses are out today, and they show that the party that was once a humble grassroots, resource-poor party is now heavily professionalized and is the third highest spending party – once again outspending the Act Party. Its expenditure of $1,706,633 in 2008 was made up of $1,457,744 in private expenditure and $248,889 in state broadcast funding. Compared to previous elections, the Greens’ spending has skyrocketed:

1990: virtually nothing

1999: $279,168

2002: $765,035

2005: $792,842

2008: $1,706,633

It seems that regardless of the amount the party spends on its campaign – virtually nothing in 1990, or close to two million in 2008 – the party always gets around 6% of the vote. What is interesting is that in 1999 the Greens were receiving a respectable cost per vote of $2.62, but because they have dramatically increased their wealth without increasing their support, in 2008 their cost per vote was $10.83 (which is based on the fact the party received 157,613 party votes). Therefore the Green Party’s 2008 billboard and television advertising campaign – which was one of the most vacuous and professional we’ve seen in New Zealand politics – actually didn’t do the party much good. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between how much a political party spends on advertising and how many votes they obtain.

Note: Somewhat disingenuously the Green Party has included a tiny portion ($187,000) of their Parliamentary Service funding in their declaration. While this is explicit admission of their continued use of parliamentary funding for party political electioneering and therefore probably needs to be repaid to Parliamentary Service, it fudges the fact that most of the Green Party’s parliamentary funding is probably spent on party political activity. Just one part of Green annual parliamentary funding, ‘Party & Members Support’ budget is about $864,000.

02 March 2009

While it might sometimes appear that the Drinking Liberally political project has been hijacked in New Zealand by the Labour and Green parties for their own partisan purposes, it doesn’t have to be that way. In Dunedin we’re lucky enough to be starting our branch of the project (Tuesday 7pm, Velvet Underground), and hopefully we can be sure not to let its potential be siphoned off by politicians for their blatant permanent electioneering. If the project is to survive as a credible and useful project for the left, it needs to be protected from such partisan abuse and top down elitist speech making from MPs and party hacks. After all the Drinking Liberally project imported from the US is a potentially exciting development for politics in New Zealand – or at least for the small politerrati involved in activism, blogging, etc – as well as also for the search for new ways of ‘doing politics’. Yet there are a number of significant problems with the project – many relating to the highly contested definition of the term ‘liberal’. [Read more below]

24 February 2009

Metira Turei has quickly become the front-runner for the job of replacing Jeanette Fitzsimons as the Green Party’s female co-leader. This blog post details the three main reasons for why Metira Turei is likely to win:

Turei has the attributes of being perceived as extremely ‘nice’ and non-threatening, which will be seen as the necessary characteristics of anyone replacing Fitzsimons.

Turei’s youthful and Maori identity will win many votes amongst party delegates because ‘identity politics’ is very important within the Green Party.

She will win because Turei better represents the Greens’ ongoing evolution towards the centre of the political spectrum.

So although ex-parliamentary spin-doctor for the Greens, Gordon Campbell, has written a blog post on the succession struggle – see: Who May Succeed Jeanette Fitzsimons – saying that he hopes that ‘the contest will not be dominated by the fact that (a) Turei is Maori and (b) Bradford sponsored the Section 59 Bill’, this will in fact be entirely what will happen. [Read more below]

13 February 2009

Alongside axing the awful Electoral Finance Act (EFA), the new National Government has also axed the supposedly more credible electoral and political finance review, which included a so-called Expert Panel and Citizens’ Forum. This blog post examines what was behind the review, and why the exercise was always going to be more about window dressing than democracy. Although expert panels and citizens’ forums are not without merit, when compared to similar exercises carried out elsewhere, the planned Labour-Green model for New Zealand was designed to be incredibly weak and undemocratic. What’s more the process by which it was brought about was just as poor as the one that produced the EFA. The National Party campaigned on axing both of these, and is now well within its right to do that. [Read more below]

10 February 2009

Prof Jack Vowles used to be New Zealand’s preeminent political sociologist, but has recently left the University of Auckland for the UK’s University of Exeter. He’s still analyzing New Zealand politics, however, and has written a review of ‘The 2008 General Election in New Zealand’ (to be published in an upcoming edition of Electoral Studies). You can download a PDF of the paper from his website. Vowles’ paper is a good solid descriptive account of last year’s election, but it also contains the following more analytical points. [Read more below].

19 December 2008

Does political advertising work? Governments and political parties spend millions of dollars on paid advertising, but the results are often of dubious effect. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between how much a political party spends on advertising and how many votes they obtain (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here). The 2008 mega-professional and expensive Green Party campaign was yet another example of this in action. The party’s taxpayer-funded Buy Kiwi Made advertising campaign has also been a significant failure. [Read more below]

07 November 2008

Political advertising, according to Simon Carr, ‘combines all the things voters most dislike about politics and about advertising – slick, costly, boastful and almost certainly untrue’. This is possibly the case with the Green Party’s 2008 billboard and television advertising campaign, which is one of the most vacuous we’ve seen in New Zealand politics, and a sign that in this year’s campaign the Greens have given up all pretence of being anything other than an empty electoral-professional party of office-seeking politicians. The party used to abhor the commodification of politics, and its MPs used to criticise other parties for their use of marketers to sell party votes as if they are just another product like a box of soap powder on the supermarket shelf. But the new business-like marketing management-driven advertising campaign of the Greens suggests that the party has not merely lost its soul, but is actively selling off its soul. This professionalisation is indicative of a Green Party that is itself become more populist, pragmatic and vacuous. While this market-oriented professionalisation is perhaps most evident in the campaign of the Green Party, it is actually a trend that is strongly present throughout all the parliamentary parties fighting the 2008 general election campaign. Therefore rather than cover the whole election campaign, this in-depth blog post seeks to draw out the nature of the 2008 election using the Greens as a case study of modern hollow politics. [Read more below]

29 October 2008

The minor parliamentary parties are killing support for MMP - that’s the impression I came away with after watching the TVNZ minor party leaders debate on Monday night. They’re killing us with boredom, consensus and sameness. Yet this should be the general election whereby the minor parties in Parliament get to shine by showing how different they are to the incredibly centrist and ‘me-too’ Labour and National parties. Surely there are millions of disaffected and unimpressed voters that are turned off the claustrophobic centrist new political consensus set up by Labour and National? But the tragedy is that all the minor parliamentary parties are infected by the same disease – they are falling over themselves to agree with one another and show how cooperative and clean they are. This isn’t useful in an election where the New Zealand public need a real choice between different political programmes rather than mere tinkering with the status quo. Part of the problem is that the current minor parties are atrophied leftovers from the 1990s. We therefore need a shake up of the New Zealand party system and the introduction of some parties that offer real change. [Read more below]

21 October 2008

Recently disclosed donations to the Greens totaling $180,000 illustrate that the party now has some significant financial backers. In fact although the Green Party had rather humble early years, it is increasingly well-funded and has even received some surprisingly large donations – including some in the past from controversial British millionaire and conservative environmentalist Edward Goldsmith. Not only is the party becoming more respectable, trimming many of its remaining leftish policies, it’s also becoming more professionalised and generally more representative of its wealthier voters. Yet, more than anything, the party is still totally reliant on its backdoor parliamentary funding to stay afloat. [Read more below]

15 October 2008

It might seem a bit odd to have a blog post about issues in NZ politics in 2007. But every year the European Journal of Political Research publishes a yearbook looking at what’s happened in the previous year in politics of 20+ western democracies. For the past decade or so, this has been written by Jack Vowles, but this year I’ve given it a go because Prof Vowles is no longer in the country. And the latest Political Data Yearbook (Volume 47, Issue 7-8, 2008) has just been published. You can read this in university libraries, and some universities will have online access to it here. But for those that can’t, below is the text that I submitted to the yearbook. Although it pertains to last year, hopefully what I’ve written is actually a useful context for understanding the current election campaign. The extensive analysis includes discussion of all the major issues from an action-packed policy year involving the ‘anti-smacking’ law, the Electoral Finance Act, extensions and enhancements to KiwiSaver and Working for Families, the terrorism raids, scandals about Air NZ in the middle east, employment and politicisation in the public service, and the charging of Labour MP Phillip Field with corruption and bribery. There was also the rise of John Key and the attempted revitalization of Labour. I argue that although it appears contradictory, political consensus and conflict increased in tandem during 2007. [Read more below]

14 October 2008

New Zealand doesn’t have a tradition of celebrity involvement in parliamentary politics, but this is changing. Perhaps surprisingly, the party at the forefront of this ‘Americanisation of New Zealand politics’ is the Greens. Recently the party has made an effort to sell itself on the basis of celebrity endorsements, by including cultural and sports stars on its billboards, using an actor to launch its 2008 election campaign, and even having an actor running for Parliament. Such a shift, according to some political scientists, is part of ‘a despicable trend that epitomizes the banal and the mindless in public life, empowering image over substance and producing pseudo-charismatic leadership’. [Read more below]

12 October 2008

An increasing array of socialists, anarchists and anti-capitalists are turning to the Green Party as the choice in the coming general election. Guest blogger John Moore argues that these leftists are either being naive or acting to deceive. He suggests that the old New Left ‘tripod’ approach of trying to combine the issues of class, race and gender have now been extended to a ‘quadpod’ approach that includes environmentalism as also having equal status in the broader leftwing struggle. [Read more below]

25 July 2008

Although the Green Party has always aspired to be a mass participatory party it has done little to bring this about. The Greens have a relatively democratic party structure, but in practice involve few activist members in steering the direction of the party. Currently the party claim to have a few thousand members. [Read more below]

22 May 2008

Differences between age groups have become relatively more important in New Zealand electoral behaviour. There is now a discernable political fracture between young and old, and for many commentators this age axis has become a significant factor in explaining modern New Zealand politics. [Read more below]

21 May 2008

There is a myth that the Green Party is full of ‘youthful exuberance, reckless idealism and what might almost be called political gaiety’ says Chris Trotter in his latest Independent Financial Review column. This he states has always been a ‘mirage’, but that the situation is getting worse now that ‘the Greens have taken on a distinctly middle-aged appearance’. He points to the fact that the average age of those at the top of the party new list is 52 years. Shining a light on the newcomers to the list, Trotter shows the Greens to be angling for a more middle-class respectability. Apart from the normal Green candidate backgrounds of ‘Small business and teaching’, the apparent new stars come from ‘the not-for-profit and public sectors of the economy’. Ex-student politician (and supposedly ex-young Nat) Kevin Hague and Kennedy Graham (brother of former National Party attorney-general, Sir Douglas Graham) are ‘unlikely to attract a very big chunk of the youth vote’ but ‘will bring an aura of upper- middle-class respectability to the Greens’. Trotter says this could all be ‘fatal’ and laments the departure of Nandor Tanczos (to whom Russel Norman is no real match), which could mean that in the coming election ‘the party will struggle to cross the 5% MMP threshold’.

11 January 2008

The National Party has announced that it will not be endorsing any third party anti-Government advertising campaigns. Their announcement is mainly in response to the appearance of a marginal campaign group entitled 'Give NZ a Fair Go'. National’s statement is somewhat of a damp squid in the sense that National is simply announcing that they will be doing what they always do – which is not to endorse other interest groups or campaigns. Political parties generally don’t. But what the statement does point to is just how ultra careful and open the National Party are attempting to be. National’s campaign course is clearly all about safety. This year’s general election is their election to lose. So they won’t be taking any risks at all, and they’ll be doing everything they can to appear squeaky clean. No party – especially National – will want to be seen as being involved in anything untoward or covert. They’ll play the game by the book. And they’ll do their best to disassociate themselves from anyone seen as extremist. Instead of a bitter campaign – I think the parties will be falling over each other to be seen as nice. Negative advertising may actually play a more limited role than in other recent elections. I was briefly interviewed about this on Radio NZ National this morning. You can listen to the MP3 podcast of that here – I’m about half way through the item. For an alternative view read the Greens’ Russel Norman’s attempt to make logic fit his view that National will indeed be associating themselves with religious extremists. The post suggests that the Greens are stuck in 2005 and have failed to actually comprehend the huge damage that the Exclusive Brethren campaign had for National.

04 October 2007

The Labour Government has just unveiled its market-driven Emissions Trading Scheme, which has the support of other political parties such as National and the Greens. Increasingly it seems that all the parliamentary parties are ‘blue-green’ parties – combining concern for the environment with trivial market-based ‘non-solutions’ to the problems of climate change. [Read more below]